Talk:Sundew

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Sundew (reviewed version) has been listed as a good article under the good-article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can delist it, or ask for a review.

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Sundew has had a peer review by Wikipedia editors which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

What a clever plant. I think it is more interesting than the Venus flytrap.

Contents 1 Oooopses 2 WP:FAC 3 image from SW Western Australia 4 Phylogeny 5 Good article nomination 6 expert needed

[edit] Oooopses

• about 100 species: no, there are much more, about 150
• they are especially abundant in South Africa and Australia: no, diversity centres are 1.) australia, 2.) south-america, 3.) africa
• In some members of the genus, the tentacles on the leaf actually move: no, the tentacles move on all species, this is neither byblis nor drosophyllum having passive traps. what you probably mean is the leaf's movement. not all species move their leaves additionally to the tentacles.
• the round-leaf sundew D. rotundifolia dies back to turions: no, it's not a turion. a turion is a winter bud of water vegetation. as D. rotundifolia is not a waterplant, we call it hibernacle then.
• Species: that's bizarre: you are using the taxonomy of Jan Schlauer, who revised the genus in 1995 against Allen Lowrie's older taxonomy concerning especially the australian species. up to now this revision has not been accepted, thus you should at least think about the use of the "classical" taxonomy.
• Denisoliver 10:02, 26 May 2005 (UTC)

If you find typos, omissions, thinkos or simple errors (like your first four points), why not just edit the page yourself, instead of listing them here and hoping someone else will fix them? I've corrected these mistakes in the article, and added a disclaimer about the species list. The list is mostly there to link to other articles about species of horticultural interest, rather than as a definitive monogram of the genus. If you want to discuss the taxonomy, then feel free to add a section yourself!

polypompholyx 13:59, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] WP:FAC

This is shaping up as a fine article - almost there. I assume that the authors are looking towards WP:FAC? -- ALoan (Talk) 12:12, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the kind comments. I was looking towards the quality of an FAC anyway... I'm not sure that I was set on nominating it in the near future. Do you have any preliminary suggestions on how to make the article better? A section on cultivation and a section on environmental status are still coming. I was then going to iron out some wrinkles, add some inline citations, maybe add additional material as it comes to mind, and submit it for review. --NoahElhardt 13:37, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] image from SW Western Australia

Here is an image I took near Boranup, near Margaret River. I will look up and try to attach a name to it. i didn't stick it on the page yet as i am a newcomer :) Cas Liber 06:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

It looks to me like young plants of a tuberous climbing species, possibly D. peltata... hadn't looked carefully enough. Since it is flowering in the rosette stage, something like D. glanduligera is more likely. Thanks for uploading the picture! We could use more of these... most species aren't represented in the commons yet, and I certainly don't have pics of Australian species to upload! As long as they are taken close enough and are sharp, I can find someone to identify each. For an ID guide, check out Carnivorous Plants of Australia Vol 1-3 by Allen Lowrie. These can be hard to get a hold of, but are real gems. --NoahElhardt 15:19, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm almost certain this is in fact D. glanduligera. The leaf morphology and flower color matches. This species has the fastest-moving tentacles in the sundew genus! After contact with an insect, the outher tentacles (called "snap" tentacles) will bend toward the inside of a leaf within a matter of a few tenths of a second! --NoahElhardt 16:49, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I took it with an 2 megapixel point n'snap old digital. I now have a Canon 350 12 megapixel thingy. I know it is a bit far away from the plant but I thought it looked nice in its moss bed. Feel free to use it where you can :) Cas Liber 23:02, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Phylogeny

Doesn't the cladogram need a scale? Usually a scale gives percent divergence for a single-gene phylogeny or some indication of time or the extent of evolutionary divergence for other relationships. However, the Cladistics page says that this isn't always the case. Which kind is this diagram? TimVickers 22:53, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

I just re-read the entire Cladistics page and am no more enlightened on cladogram scales than I was before. This does not necessarily reflect incorrectness on your part, but could instead be due to a lack of breadth of the article. If I remember correctly, the study in question used several gene lines to determine the results. However, the cladogram published with the article (see [1]) does in fact appear to have a scale of sorts, as well as other numbers that are used to indicate divergence concepts I don't even pretend to understand. I will make an attempt (probably tomorrow) to come to a basic understanding of the scale used and the meaning of the other numbers in order to see if I can rig up some sort of meaningful and halfway accurate scale on the article cladogram. If you have any insight on this, I would be grateful to hear it. You have also reminded me of the importance of the outgroups in this cladogram, and I hope to add the most pertinent ones tomorrow as well. --NoahElhardt 04:44, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry. I could help if this dealt with a single gene, but I get a bit lost after that. TimVickers 15:49, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Good article nomination

It could even be a featured article, so I have just a few minor problems:

• "10 - 200 million plants are harvested for commercial medicinal use annually." (a reference would be useful)

I've requested this info from the author of the German article (from which much of the text here originates). I'll add it as soon as I hear back from him.

Citation added. --NoahElhardt 00:24, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

• maybe a map for the distibution section?

A distribution map already exists, farther up on the page. Should I move it down? Thanks for looking over the article. NoahElhardt 23:51, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

But that's all. Great work! NCurse _work 21:20, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

I think:

• move the distribution map down. Like in the german article.

If moved it. I'm not sure what the norm is in this case: Some articles, such as Orca, include it in the taxobox while others, such as Banksia, do not.

• Notes should be references; and References should be sources.

The use of the title "Notes" seems pretty well used, but since sources is as well, I changed that one. Thoughts? Thanks --NoahElhardt 21:00, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

What do you think? NCurse _work 06:11, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Thank you for your contributions. All of my requests were fixed. I promoted it to good article. Congratulations, great work! :) NCurse _work 07:01, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] expert needed

I corrected the illogical negative "unable" and replaced it with "able" here:

The insects are used to supplement the poor mineral nutrition that sundews are able to obtain from the soil they grow in.

but according to the article, this should probably be changed to something like this:

The insects are used to supplement the poor mineral nutrition that sundews are able to obtain from the poor soils they (can therefore) grow in.

or this:

The insects are used to supplement the plants' poor ability to absorb mineral nutritions from the soil they grow in.

The article doesn't seem to say whether they grow in poor soils because they can digest insects or if they developed the ability to digest insects because they at some evolutionary stage grew in increasingly poor soils.

--Espoo 16:20, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for correcting this. You are correct in what you are pointing out: The plants have poor nutrient-uptake abilities, and they are able to grow in nutrient-poor soils only because of their carnivory. However, the original (corrected) version is the most objective. There is no need to get into the possible (and involved) evolutionary or cause-and-effect relationships here in the intro. Does that make sense? --NoahElhardt 16:33, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Yes and OK. But are you saying the article does or should talk about this later? I was not able to find any mention. Perhaps there should at least be a link. Do you know where there are discussions of this topic? --Espoo 21:43, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

The only place that this topic is covored right now is in the evolution and ecology sections of the article on carnivorous plants. It's not a subject I'm much of an expert on, but it might be worth adding a few sentences to this article as well. Would you like to give it a shot? --NoahElhardt 22:13, 20 October 2006 (UTC)

Wow, thanks (to you and the authors of that article) - very interesting and very lengthy. (Should be made into a new article on evolution and ecology of carnivorous plants, or one on each part of that, and presented in easier and drastically shortened form in carnivorous plants.) I'll have to re-read it though because it doesn't seem to answer or discuss this question chicken/egg question directly. In any case, it would probably be best to not summarise anything here and to just provide a link and point out that the topic (or a related one) is discussed in that other article. --Espoo 23:34, 20 October 2006 (UTC)